I don’t fly a whole lot. Really, I don’t even travel very much. So starting my flight out of the Raleigh/Durham Airport with a final destination of Metz, France all by myself was a little nerve-wracking. My flight to Newark was uneventful and the worst thing that happened was that my flight changed gates. No biggie. The problem came after we had finished boarding the plane. Turns out there was some terrible weather in the area… so of course we had to wait on the runway for 2.5-3 hours before we could take off. My layover in Hamburg, Germany was 2 hours. Lovely.

Luckily I was sitting next to this super nice guy who was from Hamburg Germany. He assured me that he would make sure everything was straight with my flight before he left the airport. It ended up not really being a problem. As soon as I stepped off of the plane someone was there to inform me of the new connections that I would be making and that he had already taken care of my luggage. At this point I actually ran into a guy who was also traveling to Metz for the GTL program so we were able to stick together.

So from Hamburg we flew to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt to Luxembourg (they gave out chocolate bars on the plane from Frankfurt to Luxembourg!!). From Luxembourg we took the bus to the train station. This was a little tricky because we had no idea where the stop for the train station was. Luckily a girl sitting next to us spoke English and said she would let us know when we needed to get off. We bought our tickets and then took the train to Metz.

Our original plan had been to check into the dorms, but because of our new flight schedules we weren’t able to do that. So instead we took a cab to a hostel and stayed there for the night. Early the next morning we got up and took a cab to where we would be staying for the semester.

I didn’t really get here how I was expecting to, and I’m pretty sure I almost gave my parents a heart attack, but I am here!!